Electoral Registration

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

I begin with a happy announcement. If colleagues wish to go outside from about 6 pm, national voter registration day, which is tomorrow, is being celebrated this evening by a projection on to the Elizabeth Tower of an exciting animation showing ballot papers going into a ballot box. I thank the Speaker for facilitating my request to involve Parliament in national voter registration day. I am sure colleagues will avail themselves of the opportunity for a wonderful “selfie” from Westminster bridge.

More seriously, the elephant in the room is not the technicalities of voting and registration, but why people are disengaged from politics. We must facilitate people’s engagement with politics. The real reason people are not engaged with registration and voting is that they are disengaged from our democracy. They suffer a daily drip feed of corrosive cynicism, often very strongly politically biased, from the media. Our parties have atrophied. We have concentrated more and more on 50 to 100 marginal seats and not looked after our parties. There is immense ignorance, which none of us does much to dispel, around the idea that Parliament and Government have the same, rather than conflicting, interests. There is a failure, even in this place, to set out what a plural, devolved democracy of independent institutions might look and feel like. Add to that the chronic sclerosis of Whitehall and an over-centralisation that kills local creativity and responsibility, and we have a recipe of poor capability on electoral registration and bureaucracy around voting that can produce a poisonous mixture for the future of our democracy.

I am delighted we are seeking to address at least some of those difficulties today. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has reported seven times on this specific issue since 2011—seven separate reports by a Select Committee of this place to flag up what might go wrong with individual electoral registration. I have gone back through the reports today looking over the same difficulties. To the Government’s credit, they have addressed some of them, in particular on finance and on certain technical matters, and I am grateful for that. Fundamentally, however, many of the difficulties the Committee has outlined over five years are coming to pass, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) said from the Opposition Front Bench, with just 92 days to go before an election and 38 days to go before Dissolution. In our complacency, we have let these problems grow and we are finding immense difficulties in each of our constituencies.

On postal voting, about half a million people have been kicked off the electoral register because they failed to reregister. That is a misfortune for them. Many of us will have been on the doorstep and said, “Hello, I am your Member of Parliament. I can see that you might need a postal vote. Can we give you that postal vote? Can we get that registration for a postal vote for you?” The Member of Parliament has been there and almost given a guarantee that the constituent will have a postal vote, but some of those people will be the very people who will not now be eligible to vote—some may not be in the first flush of youth—because of all the technicalities. We need to make sure we get these messages over and get them over quickly.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman will know that the universal postal voting regime was introduced to boost turnout. Why does he suppose that since 2001 turnout has been 59%, 61% and 65%, whereas in previous elections it was 75%, 73% and 78%?

[Mr Allen]

We live in a democracy and it is the sacred duty of every Member of this House of every party to ensure that as many people register to vote and as many people can vote as is humanly possible. To throw out this red herring of fraud when there has only been a handful of cases—[Interruption.] As my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) reminds me, only one case has ended in a successful prosecution. Denying millions of people the right to vote is the biggest fraud we are perpetrating in our democracy and we should not be collaborating on that.

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[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who is an agreeable chap. I can only assume that his conspiracy theory arises from his upbringing in the murky world of Labour and trade union politics in the north-east. Like his friend the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), he sees a conspiracy round every corner.

I have been in politics for 30 years, but for Labour Members it is always about politics, not about what is in the national interest or what is right. Even when they start off by doing what is right, proper and decent to address an issue, they turn around a few years later and say, “We don’t agree with it any more, because it does not suit our narrow partisan interests.” How do they have the gall?

The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd trooped through the Lobby to vote against fair and equal boundaries. Along the coast from his constituency, Arfon has an electorate of 49,000, while my next-door constituency of Cambridgeshire North West has almost 100,000 electors. He considers that to be democratic, but it is not.

[Chris Ruane]

When making seats equal was being railroaded through, 7.5 million people were missing from the register, which would be the equivalent of 100 extra parliamentary seats.

[Mr Jackson]

I am not wholly convinced that the Labour party has ever taken electoral integrity as seriously as it should have done. The hon. Gentleman talks about the criminal cases over the past few years. My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) alluded to the fact that we simply do not know how much electoral registration stuffing there has been, because EROs and local authorities have not had the capacity to check that across the country. Under the Labour party, we saw electoral malpractice and criminal activity in Pendle, Derby, Birmingham, Bradford, Slough and Peterborough, to give just a few examples.

Let us be honest: this debate is a wasted opportunity for the Labour party. It is inviting us to conclude that an impact assessment of its Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, in which individual electoral registration was originally contained, would have shown no reduction in the number of people registering. Of course that is not the case. I was in the House at the time and we all knew that there would be a reduction after the first major change for many years.

The Labour party now comes back and says that this is an evil, wicked Tory plot to drive poor people off the register. The crocodile tears were not flowing when it blocked servicemen and women—people who were fighting and dying for our country—from coming back, casting their ballots and using the universal franchise. Labour Members were not worried then. Now they are full of crocodile tears and faux outrage over the patronising notion that their voters are not on the register.

The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) bemoans the situation with older people and postal votes. Does she think that people who are older are so stupid that they cannot fill out forms? Before the 2001 changes, older people and pensioners were able to fill out forms in cases of ill health, if they were working away or if they were in other circumstances. More to the point, the turnout was much higher.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jackson]

I will not give way to the hon. Lady.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

You named her.

[Mr Jackson]

I named her, but I have named a lot of people in this debate.

The Labour party’s problem is simple: it is useless Labour councils. Those useless Labour councils are being given a lot of taxpayers’ money to do the job properly. They should be canvassing, registering people, ensuring that the right people are on the register and ensuring that there is electoral integrity in the register. If Labour Members have problems in Bristol, County Durham and the London borough of Merton, all of which are controlled by the Labour party, they should take them up with local people.

[Chris Ruane]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Mr Jackson]

I cannot give way, I am afraid, because I have little time.

If this were a plot, we would not be putting so many public resources into the process. There has been £500,000 to boost confidence in the electoral system, £2.5 million has been spent on students and overseas voters, £6.8 million has been given to local authorities by the Department for Communities and Local Government for physical canvassing for registration, and there has been work on universities and housing associations as part of the Cabinet Office’s £9.8 million funding.

We accept that some people will be missed in the DWP data-matching. In the central ward in my constituency, about 40% of people were missed. We understand that, but it is ultimately the responsibility of local authorities to find the missing voters by physical door-to-door canvassing. In that way, we will have a full register with integrity.

For most of the time, the previous Labour Government were content to see the potential for electoral register stuffing.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jackson]

No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman.

I have two more brief points to make. In considering this issue, the Minister should look again at bespoke funding to investigate improprieties and criminal activities in respect of election fraud, because it is difficult for a small constabulary to cope with such matters. We must look again at the Representation of the People Act 1983 in respect of ID at polling stations and the ability to challenge voters in cases of impersonation. That is an important issue.

Finally, the Government have done an excellent job—largely, I admit, with cross-party support—on postal vote integrity, which is still an important issue. For example, Peterborough city council threw out one in five applicants for postal votes in Central ward in May 2014. Fraud is still a problem and we must be vigilant and protect the electoral integrity of our political system. We should ensure that the right people are on the electoral register and have the opportunity to vote. That is above party politics, and it is a shame that the Labour party cannot rise above partisan point scoring in the national interest.